Any dog lovers out there?

🐶 Dog Park is a game with quite an unusual theme: you play as dog walkers who are adding more and more dogs to their kennels, providing them with balls, sticks, treats and toys, and most importantly taking them on walks so they are pleased. 🥰 Each round you collect reputation with the goal of being the most accomplished dog walker!

Each round is made up of 3 phases, and all of them use different game mechanics. 🧐

🐕 It begins with the Recruitment. Here you are secretly bidding for dog cards using your reputation. Dog cards have a type, a resource cost to take on walks, and also a special skill. ☝️ You have to consider these when choosing which dog to take. There are also randomly distributed Expert cards on the board, which show which types of dogs are worth the most points at the end game majority scoring.

⚽ In the Selection phase you are choosing which dogs to walk - at most 3 of them. To take a dog, you have to pay for their needed resources. Certain dogs have abilities that trigger upon choosing them, so you can make some combos here.

🐾 Lastly the Walking Phase has you moving on a track, collecting things - pretty much like in Parks. You can move 1-4 spaces and collect the bonus of the space you land on. The slower you walk the more stuff you can collect, but people exiting faster are rewarded. So you have to be flexible and change tempo to match the others. Certain dog abilities will be useful in this phase.

⛓️Before starting the new round a new park card is drawn that changes the allocation of resources, and a new forecast card comes into effect modifying some rule of the game.
You play 4 rounds like this, then see who has the most reputation 🏆 - don’t forget the objective cards!

💭 Dog Park is a must for dog lovers! We are not dog experts, but I am always down for a unique theme! Beautiful realistic drawings show all kinds of dogs, and the pastel color palette of the game is very pleasant. The gameplay is quite engaging - there are a lot of smaller minute-to-minute decisions to make, that all count in the end, and I love how every phase uses another mechanic. 🥰 We’ll explore it more in depth, so stay tuned!